Debashis Basu: A governance lesson from the digital world

One of the aims of policymaking and governance must be to reduce friction and facilitate ease of use. The best kind of governance is one that unobtrusively nudges people in the right direction and helps them complete the task at hand quickly and easily. A generation ago, governance systems were a nightmare for a bitter citizenry: from documents in triplicate to attestations, repeated physical visits, to rude officials and a zillion rules to make your life miserable in every interaction you had to have with the government. Things have changed a wee bit with apps and websites allowing easier interaction. How can we improve governance a lot more? By taking a leaf or two from the digital world.

Today, policymakers and digital experts live in parallel worlds. The digital world actively interacts with its users, aiming to improve what is called "user experience" through better and better "user interface." Policymakers don't interact with citizens and so do not feel the pain of truculent officialdom, as Kaushik Basu sheepishly confessed in his book An Economist in the Real World; Mr Basu's able assistants easily got his work done by pulling rank. An essential component of the official governance system is complexity (which, by the way, is also common among certain kinds of companies like pharmaceuticals and financial services). Maybe it helps policymakers to keep things complex. Maybe they are simply careless. The United States' tax code has nearly tripled in volume during the last decade to 3.8 million words. Even tax officials apparently cannot file their own returns. It is as bad or worse in India.

The digital ecosystem abhors such complexity, fine print and clutter. Its goal is simplicity, transparency and ease-of-use. The textbook example of this is the minimalist design and intuitive features of Apple products or the clutter-free home page of Google. Thousands of digital experts around the world are relentlessly focused on removing that one extra click for users of their products - all to make their products even more effortless. Can't policymakers learn from this? They can, if they do what user experience (UX) and user interface (UI) experts do day-in and day-out. Here are some key differences between officials tasked with governing us, and digital experts tasked with creating a pleasurable user experience.

Testing: Officials design systems and we are supposed to live with them, no matter how hard it is for us to use. Web designers acknowledge they don't know what really works best and therefore do what is called A/B testing. That is, they create two websites or two interfaces and test which one is more popular with customers. Digital products have data on the number or clicks, time taken to accomplish a task, conversions from visitors to registered users and drop-offs. It is easy for them test. Policymakers must similarly build ways and means to test the pain points of users.

Feedback: Officials have very little interaction with those they are supposed to serve. Have you seen an easy-to-use feedback form or a register? Does anyone get back to you about your feedback? Digital marketers actively seek feedback because they know that is the only way to improve. The best of digital products frequently ask users to rate a feature, or an answer. The feedback system is central to the popularity of platforms like Quora, where you can upvote and downvote answers, which, over time identify those who are helping people with better answers.

Ease: Policymakers are not concerned with how effortful any compliance activity is for the citizens. On the other hand, the cornerstone of any UX and UI process is to minimise effort. There is something called the Fitt's law used in human-computer interaction and ergonomics, which predicts that the "time required to rapidly move to a target area is a function of the ratio between the distance to the target and the width of the target." This is why the submit button is often big, bright-coloured and close to the last field in the form.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has promised us minimum government and maximum governance. Political and ideological compulsions have led him to abandon the first part of the slogan. It is therefore hard for him, in my view, to deliver the second part. But if he really means to deliver maximum governance, he will have to get his officials to listen to citizens and simplify things for them. It is not so hard to do, at least digitally, as relentless refinements in UX and UI have shown. Indeed, it is quite ironical that those who pay taxes are treated so shabbily, while those of us who use free apps and websites are pampered with smooth interfaces, delightful experience and constant improvement. This is because the overwhelming driving force in the digital world is empathy for the user, which leads to simplification and reduction of users' efforts. Shouldn't that be the exact goal of better governance?

The writer is the editor of www.moneylife.in
Twitter: @Moneylifers